Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Bill Gates scoffs at $100 computer project
Bill Gates recently scoffed at the effort of MIT and other partners to build a $100 computer for emerging markets, mostly in the third world.
I first proposed a $100 computer in 1998, but was ignored because the idea was regarded as preposterous. Gates, I think, is threatened by the thought of a computer catching on among hundreds of millions of people that does not run Windows (the MIT system uses a version of Linux).
Instead, Gates thinks everyone ought to buy a much pricier $600 tablet computer, in part because it comes with "support." Gates does not explain where the world's poor are supposed to come up with $600 or the hundreds of dollars per year that Microsoft tries to extract from its customers with upgrades and fees. He also says the world's poor should first "get a broadband connection." He also fails to explain how they would do that. It is an especially odd remark since many Internet users in the U.S. can't get broadband connections.
A small computer with the right applications would be extraordinarily useful even without an Internet connection. As I outlined in 1998, when someone first turns the computer on, it could run a diagnostic program that tries to determine if the person holding the machine can read. If not, it starts teaching that person how to read and write.
Gates also talks about the need for power hungry hard drives, but these are not essential for a first computer, and drive up the cost without adding a lot of value. One of the problems with Windows is that it is too big a piece of software to run without a hard drive, whereas Linux is available in versions that run in small amounts of memory, so a hard drive is not required.
The Gates Foundation is doing good work trying to provide health care aid to the world's poor; it's hard to understand how Gates could be so tone deaf on the technology side.
Here is a suggestion for Bill: Take a billion or so of your cash hoard and write a version of Windows that will run on the MIT $100 computer. Then give it away free. It would create a huge base of potential customers, some of whom might eventually want to buy a copy of the full version of Windows. Otherwise, stop throwing brickbats at people who are trying to do some good in the world.
Technology News:
Google buys Sketch Up
There is so much news about Google, I probably ought to add a category just for the company. Google's latest acquisition is a small firm that sells a relatively pricey 3D drawing and CAD package called >Sketch Up. It sells for $500.
It may seem like an odd choice, but apparently Google is going to find a way to incorporate the 3D drawing and visualization tools into Google Earth. You could sketch a new building and drop it into a Google Earth visualization of the actual site where it would be built.
Like Google Earth itself, there will probably be some limited free version, and a fee-based "pro" version.
No matter what you think about the company itself, Google is doing some interesting stuff with software, unlike Microsoft, who has not really been able to come with anything new in many years. Google is pushing "personal" software to entirely new levels, and while you may not like the way they do business, the company is forcing other companies to come up with new strategies and to adapt. That's a good thing. We need some fresh air in IT and software tools.
Technology News:
The two tier Internet
The Christian Science Monitor has an article about the emerging two tier Internet. It is a good overview of the political and technical issues that are driving this problem. The big broadband access companies (e.g. the phone and cable firms) are determined to wrestle control of their customers away from the open Internet.
From their perspective, it makes perfect sense. They built their networks, and companies like Google are making billions by carrying traffic over them--those roads are not free, by the way. Google has to pay huge amounts of money for the bandwidth needed to make all those searches happen quickly. But not enough of it trickles back to the phone and cable companies, in their opinion.
It is unfortunate that the issue has become so polarized. You end having to take the side of the access companies (not entirely admirable firms) or the side of companies like Google, which are also not entirely admirable.
But the real impact is on communities and economic development. What if every road in your community was privately owned? And there were tollboths on every road into town? Everyone and every business that wanted to come into the community had to pay a toll--would that be good for economic development? Of course not. But that's where most communities are right now.
There is another way--build public roads and let all businesses use them. It's a model that has worked for a hundred years.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Chinese government competes with Google
Just weeks after news that Google "respects" the Chinese government's efforts to censor free speech, the Chinese have rolled out their own search engine, meaning that Google's efforts to suck up to the communists was all for naught.
The Accoona name, according to the Web site, "is derived from the Swahili phrase, Hakuna Matata, which means 'don’t worry be happy.'” In other words, the communist government has used a name popularized by a Disney character who, in the movie, went around saying, "Don't worry, be happy." Which kind of sounds, to me, like instructions to the Chinese people.
"Don't worry that we are cataloguing everything you look at. Don't worry that we are building a dossier of every single search you have ever made. Don't worry that we will throw you in jail and beat you for typing the word "freedom" in your browser. Don't worry that we can make you disappear if we feel the need. Just be happy."
Even stranger, the Chinese have hired Bill Clinton as a spokesperson. So now we have ex-presidents flogging communist-controlled search engines? What's next? U.S. Senators promoting Viagra?
I'll pass on this search engine. Hard as it is to imagine, this outfit will probably make Google look like good guys.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Maryland bans Diebold voting machines
Following on the heels of New Mexico, which recently mandated that all voting systems in the state use an auditable paper ballot, Maryland has banned the faulty and insecure Diebold voting machines. The legislature has required that the company retro-fit the machines with a paper record of each vote, and also specified changes in security and machine set up to reduce the possibility of vote tampering by those with physical access to the machines.
The Dieblold machines can have their vote count changed by someone with physical access to the machine, and without a paper trail, there is no way to detect the altered votes. It is a great relief that lawmakers have finally begun to make changes. What is unfortunate is that these very same lawmakers wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on faulty systems. Many security experts warned of problems long before the systems went into use.
Knowledge Democracy:
Debit card PINs stolen
As we move more and more of our financial transactions away from cash and toward end to end electronic transactions, our systems have to become more reliable and more secure.
But a lot of systems were designed and implemented prior to ubiquitous worldwide access via the Internet, and the security that worked okay then has to be regularly scrutinized and tested today.
Hackers figured out how to steal PINs and the encryption keys used to decode PINs from Citibank.. It is the latter that is the real problem. Merchants are apparently not erasing all of the data from a debit card transaction once it is complete, and hackers figured out to read the data, giving them access to thousands of PINs and the associated accounts. The Citibank problem is only with debit cards, but it is a warning to banks, merchants, and credit card processors that security reviews and testing have to be part of the normal IT budget.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Say good-bye to the laptop
I think the laptop is a dying device. They will not disappear entirely, but ten years from now, you won't see them very often.
On the desktop, most of us will have something that looks a lot like the Mac mini--a very small, quiet, fast, and unobtrusive device. Or we will have something like the iMac, where there is no box at all. Windows versions of the mini are already appearing.
So where does that leave the laptop?
Most laptops will be replaced by smaller, much lighter flat panel computers that have no keyboard. CeBit, the big computer hardware expo, is , and we will see many more of these in the next year or so. Very few of us really need to lug around a laptop when traveling. These little devices will do most on the road jobs very nicely.
Technology News:
There is still a lot we don't know
Scientists at Sandia Labs have created temperatures of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit. To put that in perspective, it is only about 15 million degrees Fahrenheit at the center of the sun.
You should read the whole article, but they have been able to duplicate the results consistently. Even more interesting, they don't understand how it is happening. They just know that they can do it over and over again, meaning it's not some one time fluke.
Here is the really interesting part: At a certain point in the process, the machine is emitting more energy than it takes to get the process started. In other words, scientists have stumbled onto an entirely new way to generate energy. From the article:
"Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down."
Yes, we are runnning out of oil, but we've got lots of other options that are going to replace oil, and will likely cost less and pollute much less. We have a bright future ahead of us--literally. My prediction--over the next hundred years, energy prices will actually drop. Plan for it.
Technology News:
iTunes sells The Daily Show
Apple has signed a contract with Comedy Central to sell a whole month's worth of The Daily Show (16 episodes) for $9.99. That works out to sixty-two cents per show. That's not a bad price, but I think that long term, we need to see the cost per half hour go below ten cents for things that you are not likely to watch more than once.
But things are headed in the right direction. This allows you to cut the tether to the television completely if there are only a few shows you care about. With cable TV bills running close to $40/month, if you are selective about what you watch (of course, not everyone is), you can buy a lot of TV at about $1 per hour.
Not coincidentally, as I predicted long ago, Tivo is having problems. Everyone and their brother are rolling out digital video recorder (DVR) boxes, with the cable companies putting real pressure on the firm, but the ability to just download what you want to watch and store it on your computer completely negates the need for a DVR at all. And the high initial price plus the monthly subscription will buy you a lot of TV at the iTunes store.
The DVR market is dead. A wide variety of excellent open source (free) and commercial DVR software programs that run on your home computer will be available within a year, they won't cost anything to use, and it won't send all your viewing choices back to the company where they sell them to advertisers building massive dossiers on your life. There are already lots of choices, and the DVR software market is growing daily. Tivo is dead, dead, dead.
Technology News:
Google click fraud costs $90 million
Google has chosen to pay advertisers a settlement of $90 million in return from protection from future lawsuits. Numerous advertisers have found competitors paying people to click on ads and/or using software 'bots to click through ads. Doing so brings more revenue to Google and can dramatically increase costs for advertisers.
Google has refused to talk about the problem much, leading to speculation that the company profits handsomely from the fraud. The company has detailed statistics on where clicks come from, and could certainly develop analytical routines that look for such fraud and throw away fraudulent click throughs. But that would reduce revenue. Google stock lost 3% after the announcement.
In other Google news, screen snapshots have leaked out on Google's "free" calendar application, which of course will be lathered with ads and will require you to provide personal information to Google to use. The company is probably drooling over the thought of getting whole families to use the application, because they can then capture young consumers and begin building dossiers on them at a very early age.
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